The Passionate and the Fitful

...What the poet chooses to forget is that the poor do have names, and that their lives are mysterious only to unperceptive outsiders...

...Thematically the book is interesting for Wright's preoccupation with criminals and with the downtrodden, the insulted and injured...

...The book was free and alive...

...It seems that she would rather write a new poem than revise an old one...

...Bright, arresting images and perceptions leap from the pages of her poems, some of them whimsical and naive, others profound and breathtakingly original...

...I think I have changed my mind...

...It is only when Miss Wakoski is carried away by a gust of powerful emotion that she can create formally unified poems...

...And some of the phrasing is awkward in sound, as in "my black Ohioan swan...

...Even his anti-Establishment imagery and his "anti-cop" attitudes seem curiously unconvincing...

...he remains the middle-class outsider, envying the insecurity of the poor...

...But she has spent most of the present decade in New York City teaching, writing and reading her poems in coffeehouses, churches and art galleries to large and appreciative audiences...

...I once thought that James Wright was capable of miracles of expressiveness...

...Having said that, I must concede that "perfection" in poetry is not very interesting...

...She can write about anything and everything...

...James Wright is an older poet than Diane Wakoski and better known to the poetry-reading public...

...Like Walt Whitman, she is indiscriminate in her enthusiasm for sensory experience...

...And Miss Wakoski certainly tells it "like it is...

...This figure is sometimes a father and sometimes a husband and, occasionally, George Washington, who serves as a sort of paragon of virtue, a great generative and controlling force, in Miss Wakoski's private mythology...

...The new collection is fitfully fanciful and sentimental and betrays a lack of energy...

...Consider, for example, "The kidneys do not pray, the kidneys drip...

...Store with the secrets of the wheat and the mysterious lives/ Of the unnamed poor...

...One must work in his own terms...

...It is enough that he is alive and telling the truth...

...he is much more interested in the large bowwow effect than in individual lines and their content per square inch...

...I have read all of these books and must report, disappointedly, that his latest, Shall We Gather at the River, is his weakest work...

...she has no sense of the "line" in poetry, so her poems sprawl prosily on the page...

...He says, for instance, that "A cop's palm/ Is a roach dangling down the scorched fangs/ Of a light bulb...

...Indeed, she is the darling of the new generation...

...Her other defects can be quickly noted...

...I also like "Slicing Oranges for Jeremiah," a moving tribute to a woman whose life is devoted to her mentally retarded son, a boy of six who cannot talk and "would eat a dozen oranges if you would let him...

...It is the feeling of love that is particularly interesting...

...and most of her poems —being explorations of feeling?lack intellectual substance...

...He is the author of The Green Wall (1957), Saint Judas (1959), and The Branch WillNotBreak (1963...

...Elsewhere he remarks: "I want to be lifted up/ By some great white bird unknown to the police...

...Writing poems is as easy and natural to Miss Wakoski as breathing, and this naturalness is one of her charms...

...In the present collection I like the poem entitled "In Gratitude to Beethoven," in which Miss Wakoski sets up Beethoven's music as an ideal mode of escape from her emotional conflicts: "His music/ has all the life you loving people I hate so much/ are trying to squeeze out of me...

...It is important that a poet not be overawed by the achievements of classical poets, those who are praised in classrooms for seemingly unattainable excellences...

...The first two were skillfully written in traditional forms, and in Saint Judas Wright created some startling and powerful poems in his effort to demonstrate the humanity of criminals and "Judas types...

...She has appeared in a number of magazines, little and big, and has published several collections of poems in addition to the volume under review: Coins and Coffins (1962), Apparitions and Discrepancies (1966), The George Washington Poems (1967), and Greed, Part I (1968...

...The speaker of her poems is forever reaching out for love and withdrawing in pain, as though she has touched atomic waste...

...I thought so after I first read The Branch Will Not Break...

...some of her imagery is arbitrary and incongruous instead of being relevant and integral...

...She was included in the anthologies Four Young Lady Poets (1962), A Controversy of Poets (1965), and The Young American Poets (1968...

...She obviously does not conceive of her task as prophetic or vatic or occasional, calling for utterance of an extraordinary formality...

...The emotion dictates the exclusion of the irrelevant...

...One can get away with this sort of thing if the overall effect is strong enough, as in some of Miss Wakoski's poems, but not when centrifugal tendencies are overwhelmingly present—as they are in many of these poems...

...But he does not quite achieve the empathy he aims for...

...I have been following Miss Wakoski's career for several years, listening to her read in public and brooding over her poems in books and periodicals...

...I have been consistently impressed by her ability to convey the emotions of terror and desire, the experience of a vulnerable spirit in an environment of overwhelming verticals and horizontals...

...author, "American Poetry Since 1945" Diane Wakoski was born in 1937 in Whittier, California, and was educated at the University of California in Berkeley, where she received her bachelor's degree...

...her conception of form is faulty...

...She writes as she speaks...

...In fact, many of the poems are addressed, rather reproachfully, to an unnamed male figure who is both lover and betrayer...

...The truth is that Wright's units of attention are not small enough...

...she does not need to work herself up into a special state of elevated feeling before she can sit down at her typewriter...

...Although Wright may still be capable of miracles, this book is clearly not one of them...

...Yet, though her flights are imaginative, she permits a great deal of reality to enter her poems, often transmogrified, to be sure—as it inevitably would be under pressure of strong feelings of anger, alienation, or frustrated love...

...Reviewed by STEPHEN STEPANCHEV Professor of English, Queens College...

...he seems to be aiming at a Dostoyevskian identification with humanity...

...In his third, clearly written under the influence of Robert Bly and the "subjective image" movement, the poet broke dramatically with the past in the free rhythmic organization of his poems and produced airy, lyrical, country verse possessing a sense of the beauty of life and of the cyclical resurrections of nature...

...I have been greatly moved by such early poems as "The Starving Vicuna," "Picture of a Girl Drawn in Black and White," "Apparitions Are Singular Occurrences," "The Father of My Country" (reprinted in Inside the Blood Factory), and "Sometimes Even My Knees Smile...

...Some of the lines are outrageously bad...

...As a result, she achieves poems that have the freshness of spontaneity, but frequently, also, the raggedness of pre-poetry, of images that do not quite fuse together...

...I like three of the poems in the new book: "Before a Cashier's Window in a Department Store," "Outside Fargo, North Dakota," and "Willy Lyons...